Yeah I wonder if in the future we won't see this as a terrible crime (pushing the next dopamine hit to a bunch of addicts) or if humanity needs to evolve to gain much much more self control.
My youtube sucks, I'm always looking for stuff to kill my time and youtube recommend the same crap videos 500 times in a row. It take a long time to find something I want to watch.
I've been loading the Youtube homepage every 15 minutes for the past week (I've been sick). It's the same videos over and over again. If I scrolled past it the first time, I'm still going to scroll past it the 100th time I see it.
I don't know how Youtube's algorithms work internally, but lately the front page is just so broken that it's baffling. The sidebar recommendations are another discussion -- those are possibly more pernicious but at least not as obviously dysfunctional.
How is it possible to have the largest repository of video content in the world, yet Youtube is only able to recommend me the same videos over and over again (half of which I seen already or quickly clicked out of). There is also a simplistic list of recommended categories, which I would change if I could, and those never change either.
If the front page were just completely random, it would be better than it is now. If I could actually tell Youtube to show me videos with a low-to-moderate view count and a high upvote ratio, then that would be fabulous and I probably would encounter new subjects and ideas rather than getting stuck watching the same garbage over and over. I'll never let my future children spend even a second on Youtube, because the stuff that it recommends to kids is so asinine that it just makes me mad.
I really believe that collectively we are all much dumber because of the Youtube's pathetically bad algorithms.
You know it's bad when one of the reasons for dismissing a video is "I've watched this before". If I didn't know any better, I'd say it's a separate sub-system(gasp, microservice) that doesn't integrate nicely with the service that stores/holds your previous viewing history.
Agreed. This tweak to their formula would improve it for me masssively: show the video on my Home page just once. If I click reload, show me an entirely new set.
Someone may say, this would bother others, who saw something interesting but didn't click it this time. For me, it would train me to open those in a new tab or save them to my Watch Later list. Or just make it an opt-in feature, this aggressive renewal of the home page.
Yeah I do it, and you have to be relentless. Mark every video you don't want to see.
And god help you if you watch even one off-topic video - like another comment mentions, YouTube algorithm then concludes you want to see a million more. Reminds me of a Weird Al lyric about TiVo: "I watched Will and Grace one time, one day. Now TiVo thinks I'm gay."
You can thank toxic journalists who attacked youtube recommendations for being "toxic". You can also thank the toxic journalists for all the censorship on youtube.
Youtube recommendations 10 years ago was so amazing. Just a refresh or two and you'd get interesting stuff - obscure or popular, new or old. It didn't matter. Now, it's the same corporate, propaganda or popular vids over and over again. You bring up youtube and it's mostly the same exact recommendations from yesterday and the day before. They are literally cycling the same videos over and over again.
Why not make the default search and recommendations "PC" to appease the toxic journalists. But give the users the option to revert back to the "normal" search and recommendations.
Why can't they do it like they do search. "Safe", "Moderate", "The good old days" modes?
I find YT does a gradient ascent into more popular videos.
I start out listening to a song with 1000 views, I get recommended 10k view songs, then 100k, and before you know it it's back in the mainstream. There's no way to surf a niche, to hunt in a pile of bin ends.
I imagine it's similar for conspiracy stuff. It'll point you in the direction of the most convincing nonsense.
end up with the currently really popular conspiracy stuff. As opposed the nuanced, analysed, subtle thorough and less excitingly paced stuff.
1) CIA is interefering in US elections with evidence-free accuasation of Russia helping candidates who might reign them in to follow the law. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
2) Russia is paying bounties to kill American soldiers. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
3) Hunter Biden might be a bit corrupt. Conspiracy? or something to it?
4) The President has been compromised by Russia. Conspiracy? or something to it?
There will be incendiary stuff on all of the above absolutely full of utter nonsense. There will be reasonable stuff also assessing evidence and may even not come up with a clear and definite conclusion on one or another. Which of these will YT reccomendation push you to? I don't know.
If you search in non-latin scripts, maybe it still ascends into a mainstream, but it probably won't be your mainstream.
(YT does much more cross-script indexing now than it did when I first started playing around with this, but it still tends to silo by writing system, and if it's relevant search works much better in the original script than relying upon auto-transliteration.)
I'm big into discovering obscure music and unfortunately it's become very hard on YT, you're right. If I don't constantly search for stuff I end up on the mainstream over listened playlists which I really don't want.
I remember waaaaaay back in 2009-ish hunting for some new electronic music.
\begin{old_man_better_in_my_day}
First video I went on had about 1000 views. Every "related" video had around the same (sometimes less).
I spent 4 hours finding a bunch of new and relatively unknown artists because, rather than dragging me back to the 100k aggregate, I was allowed to explore the graph of "other people went on to watch this".
These days I'm lucky to see any sidebar suggestions that have fewer than 100k views.
\end{old_man_better_in_my_day}
I think the problem is the "one-size-fits-all" approach can't possibly capture how I would find it useful (music discovery via graph/tree traversal) vs. someone else (e.g. regular sky sports football highlights).
It's within a category. I mean I don't get recommended music videos when I'm watching an episodic video podcast, nor vice versa. But within those categories I get heavily pointed at the most popular for the category. I hypothesize it's similar for conspiracy content.
Personally, I find the opposite. When I watch conservative content on YouTube, the recommended video is almost always very milquetoast - almost always an episode of “Uncommon Knowledge” by the Hoover Institute (despite me finding those extremely boring and therefore actively avoiding them), or a speech by Roger Scruton/Jordan Peterson/Douglas Murray - thinkers who are right-wing, but “safe”.
I have two accounts, one for work and one private. One of them is for following political right-leaning stuff, the other for left-leaning.
In my experience both accounts do not try to push me to extremes. They DO try to keep me in a bubble, and both are very happy to lead me away from politics in general.
Does anyone else find these toxic post on HN to be toxic, not even trying to make a cheap point here. At least on twitter and YT I can consistently ban thinks that play on cheap emotions.
And then if you watch one Jordan Peterson video, all of sudden Youtube thinks you are a Proud Boy.
another interesting example from the past, I watched a few science/nature focused videos on Antarctica. Then youtube decided I wanted to see Antarctica conspiracy videos about aliens, secret buried worlds, and Nazi holdouts.
That being said, I think the recs have become much cleaner lately. i.e. no more Russia Today videos in my feed.
I’m quite enjoying it- I don’t watch anything political, and if anything comes up that’s a bit strange I just don’t watch it and eventually it goes away. It’s recommending me some great old footage of shows and some interesting new channels, mostly around engineering etc.
I suspect if you try and use it as a news source or anything other than entertainment it would be dangerous.
I find youtube recommendations crap because if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject.
regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other people won't get to see it I don't see how you fix this. It's presumably the same algorithm that's working most of the time that's surfacing the crap.
>it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life
christ, no kidding. this was my first clue that google has fundamentally changed as a company and it was time for me to leave.
ive been using gmail since it came out and watching YouTube with a signed-in, non adblocked experience for years. the algorithim doest give a SHIT. if i watch one "The Office" clip, thats suddenly 60-80% of my feed despite the fact that i dont particularly like the show. im not sure what theyve doing with all my data theyve been harvesting like gollum, but it sure isnt being used for my benefit. (i dont have kide, no one else uses my account, dont watch youtube through vpn, etc etc)
and dont get me started on the ads. ive never installed an anime girl fighting game, from gplay or anywhere else. stop it.
Oh the ads. I cannot underestimate the annoyance it has caused to viewers. Seeing the numerous memes making fun of those asset flip adware turned "games" makes me die a little inside.
Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.
The midrolls are nearly always in an awful spot in the video and especially when watching something on a serious topic so jaring.
At least most television ads are placed in a slot designed for ads to be there. Though I still find them jaring for shows that arent up-beat.
To be honest, tv ads are the reason we dont watch a lot of TV anymore. The ad:content ratio is too high, and youtube has definitely as high or higher without an adblocker.
How else do you suggest youtube pays its costs? It probably uses more bandwidth and quite possibly more storage than just about any other website on the net.
I have no idea what you are referring to.
This has never ended badly for consumers.
Why, I remember when cable came out. For a small monthly fee we could get rid of all the advertising. That turned out ... just... oh wait. Okay, then Sirius Satellite! All those ads on the radio? Just get Sirius at a small monthly fee, and bam! All ads will... be... gone... forever...
Well, uhmmm... Okay. Never mind.
/s
Does youtube even advertise it? I would guess I would have to go into my profile and find it there, but I've never seen it mentioned by youtube.
Edit: Also, I think many are jaded by cable where you pay and still get ads. Hulu has an ad-free tier, but I forget the history and if that's existed from the start. I do remember there being a lot of outrage about paying and still getting ads at some point.
I pay for YouTube Premium in Rupees. It's £1.36 a month.
One of the weird things tho, is that I didn't see Ads with Ad Blocker. Is there some regional thing that ad blocker doesn't work in the USA but it works elsewhere?
They have no problems showing me ads for exploitive garbage like raid shadow legends or some other shit I will never ever ever install or buy. And then they tell us they use the data for serving “more relevant” adverts? I call BS.
I suspect there's a simple explanation. Sometimes people go on massive subject binges and there's likely certain videos that are more likely to trigger this than others. If you watched one the youtube algorithm is basically asking if you'd like to binge the rest because a lot of other people did.
In terms of watch time and retention on site I imagine those binges are gold hence why they've ended up being optimised for.
This is exactly why I browse entirely within private mode now. I always make sure I am not signed in to my Google account before clicking any YouTube link.
I do not need to be constantly reminded of a single weird video I have clicked months before.
Yes; in particular it would be nice if the algorithm mixed in "here's some videos on a topic you watched a bunch of six months or a year ago" sometimes. But it's so fixated on the very short term of your history that if a topic ever ages out of that it's gone forever, unless you personally remember it and go searching for it...
It doesn't ever seem to be short term for me... It shows me the same uninteresting videos for months.
Oh, you watched a game streams? How about I show you three of that game on the top of the page until you stop coming back.
The only thing that works to get rid of them is to downvote it. I don't want to give the downvote, but it's the only way to make the algorithm understand I don't care about what they are showing me.
It's kinda picky though in what it spams you with. For example I watch tons of space engineering bids, will watch anything from Scott Manley as soon as it comes out, yet it often doesn't recommend it to me, I gotta hunt it down somehow.
A friend of mine has the same problem, but I don't. I almost think YouTube has him and you in some weird long-term A/B test. I sent him some French rapper as a joke one day and YouTube proceeded to send him crappy French rap for the next several weeks.
This isn't my experience at all. On certain subjects, YouTube will start relentlessly pushing an agenda. If I watch some videos where people talk about sci-fi movies or TV, my recommendations become flooded with videos about how SJWs are ruining Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, etc. It's gotten to the point that I now only watch such videos in Incognito Mode.
Indeed, if you watch a video repairing your dish washer, usually a one off task, Youtube will assume you have developed a fetish for watching white good repairs, and they will pop up in your recommendations for weeks.
It’ll eventually get a little better but it takes a LOT of repetition. For example, after the gamer tantrum a few years ago anything remotely related (e.g. some designer’s talk - dry, non-provocative) would queue a bunch of anti-feminist “reaction” rants and it took many dozens of dislikes before that would stop after watching one video in the area. Science topics were similar - the angry reactionary side of the new atheism movement presumably has equal engagement numbers so the algorithm really wants you to settle in for some ad views.
Yeah, the recommendations are completely useless for me. They get stuck in some random topic I’m not even interested in just because I watched a video once.
This is really annoying. A couple days ago, my wife was having trouble sleeping and I selected a competitive Tetris match video for her as a joke. Now I can't stop getting recommendation for all tetris-related stuff. I want my Tetrisless life back.
Exactly. I've been on Tik Tok for a few months and I feel like I've seen a hundred times as many interesting and relevant videos that have actually improved my life and inspired purchases as I've ever seen on YouTube, mostly just on my For You Page (aka its recommendation algorithm). As a user, it doesn't feel like magical AI, it just feels like Tik Tok quickly grokked my most basic demographic information and frequently tries feeding me things that anyone would guess might be relevant to a 40 year old American dad who likes videogames (aka stuff Google knows). It's perplexing that Google, masters of A/B testing, can't figure out that parenting advice or retrogaming content might be relevant to me.
Granted the interaction model is very different, and who knows if I'd ever commit to watching even a 5 minute YouTube video on something I'm not primed to watch, but after Tik Tok, Youtube feels like a stale product of yesteryear.
> if I watch something on one subject it seems to assume the subject is now the love of my life and proceeds to offer a zillion on just that subject.
There was a distinct point in time a couple years ago where this started to happen. Before that, my YouTube feed was always a diverse selection of all the different topics I had ever watched. Now, if I watch one car review my feed is full of car channels. If I watch one political video it fills with politics. Nothing I do seems to affect YouTube's singular focus on whatever topic I've most recently viewed.
so how does it work so go on me? I find urges to check the feed all the time. But the content rarely engages me. I watch a couple minuets then switch. What is going on here? why am I gravitated towards it? Can I use the same process to my benefit? Like can you build your own algorithm to get you addicted o healthy information?
I think being aware of what's happening to you is the right direction. The content rarely engages you, and that's part of the feature that's trapping you. Partial reinforcement is extremely addicting. If you gave somebody a pile of dimes and said "put these in this slot machine, pull the lever and get 11 cents every time" nobody would play that game. But the randomness of a slot machine means that when it hits, your brain lights up.
Youtube's "recommended for you" section is a slot machine for whatever will engage you. For me it's novelty, for a lot of people it's an irresistible clickbait title. Nobody is immune to it, although I feel the hacker news crowd might be suspect to clickbait much more specific than whatever youtube chums the waters with on their front page when you're not logged in and have no history (open Youtube in an incognito window to see what I'm talking about, it's terrible).
Educate your non tech friends to use adblockers, vpn and cleaning browser data after each session. Actually YouTube has decent search with filters. Don’t use any suggested video search an build a profile ( if you wish).
Terrible recommendations. One can start watching relatively harmless “list of Pokémon with illustrations” or “evolution of super Mario characters” videos and instantly it will start recommending videos of violent games or live-streaming gamers swearing - so it goes from something age-appropriate to something totally opposite.
Also don’t get me started on getting bombarded and suggested only “sound variations” videos which are noisy, rude and an attack on the senses - pure garbage content. Definitely a huge leap to assume I’ll find this interesting based on my previous choices.
Maybe instead of complaining here I should just go ahead and delete YouTube :)
Protip if this annoys you: go to myactivity.google.com, delete everything and pause all further collection. Now only your subscriptions and likes count (and maybe a few other things that are not considered "activity"). It's so much better! Did it once and now I don't want to go back.
Just like how google maps won't store your search history or use your current location to help narrow search results if I don't let it store my location history indefinitely?
Really? I found they just recommend videos I have already watched along with the usual "Trending" garbage. I have to manually check my subscriptions to actually find the content I want to watch, its beyond frustrating.
That's why I'm never logged in. And I also clear my cookies everytime I close the browser. Youtube to me now is more like a blank page where I search for stuff instead of a weird aggregator.
The impact of such algorytms is devastating. Not only because they recommend engaging content that may lead to addiction and waste of time, the most precious thing every human being has.
What is even worse such algorytms force creators to become part of this harmful scheme. Knowledge is the thing that is hurt also. It should be out there. For decades people learned how to explain complex things in an easy way. Because there is no other way we can as people evolve and learn.
But now these algorytms promote the opposite. People who have nothing to say, people who complicate simple stuff beyond imagination are paid for doing so.
On the other hand people who have something to say are bashed because they are not engaging enought, they don't do videos that fit needs of video addicts. So they are not paid.
Such algorytms are the worst thing humand kind invented in last years. The devastating effect of these can be compared to drugs and gambling. It should be banned.
I feel that this is becoming true of much of the internet. The number of lame, banal blog posts that I come across is just insane. A lot of the tech blogs are just cheap ripoffs of original documentation/examples or just fluff. This is madness.
I have confused feelings on the "efficiency" of their recommendations. As many others attest to, their recommendations lean heavily on popularity, and any one video in your history can change dramatically the majority of videos you get recommended. Even if most of your history is on completely different topics, that one video will dominate the recommendations.
People tend to suggest this is intended behavior, my question is instead: Is the recommendation engine all that good to begin with, given how a lot of people find their recommendations confusing, lackluster, or downright bad?
The YouTube algorithm's incentives seem to be responsible for so many videos being excessively long. Everything wants to waste your time because YouTube and the creator make more money that way.
I know I'm old but dang for some reason I really dislike recommendations from almost any company.
For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever.
So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.
Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and all the ad services and any other service that uses some algorithm to decide what to put in my face.
It's to the point that 3 out 4 time I'll open videos in private windows so they don't get added to my profile and used for recommendations.
I don't mind going to a tech sight and seeing ads for tech or a car site and seeing ads for cars. Do mind visiting an apartment listing site and then going around the net and having every other sight shove ads for apartments in my face.
It's like the media company is taking the driver seat of your mind and decides you need to watch these videos over and over. Where have individualism and creativity gone?.
The search function still exists, recommendations are really aimed at low effort engagement. YouTube recommendations are only aiming for the equivalent quality of channel surfing when most user generated content is really bad.
Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.
I open private tabs as well for some videos that interest me, but that I wouldn't like to keep receiving recommendations on similar videos. I thought I was alone :)
> So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.
The top of the list is the product of some recommendation algorithm. Clicking through https://news.ycombinator.com/newest, there were some 900 submissions in the past 24h; you probably chose from a small subset of that.
I much prefer a really good and feature full browse and search functionality rather than recommendations. Youtube has really poor search and even worse browsing ability.
It amazes me that advertising companies have been able to brainwash companies into paying more for "targeted ads". Usually I spend a few days doing research into whatever big purchase I plan to make, then for the next 6-12 months I get spammed with ads for that product on every platform. It's such a waste of their money and my time.
I've said it many times now: people should be avoiding "the algorithm" as much as they can on streaming and social media sites.
On Facebook "avoiding the algorithm" entails creating a friends list of all your friends, then using the link to that list as a portal into facebook. Posts and shares are listed in chronological order without anything missing (which is absolutely NOT true for the normal news feed, even when "chronological order" is selected). No "so-and-so commented on this" or "so-and-so liked that". Just posts and shares. Scroll through the feed until you recognize something, and you're done.
On youtube, you really should be going straight to subscriptions first. If you want to look for recommendations that's perfectly fine, you can go to the home page... but don't go there by default.
On reddit, I recommend using /r/all as a portal with some of the more obnoxious subreddits blocked.
I'm aware that what you see is still influenced by the algorithm in these examples, but the impact is reduced by a lot.
Browse with intention. Make deliberate choices. Don't just let the algorithm lead you around.
Remember, "the algorithm"s on these sites aren't designed for your benefit. They're designed to increase the site's metrics. More clicks. More time on that website.
I think client apps can help a lot in all of these cases. Like newpipe for YouTube or infinity for reddit. They clear out tracking as much as possible and let you browse without logging in.
But the website of all these site feels useless and slow to me. Recommendations were good on yt, but I think they stopped it during the election. So, I defaulted to newpipe and freetube.
In my experience, recommendations are still good. You just can't rely on them anymore because if you keep following them, you tend to go to whatever is popular rather than going deeper down the rabbit hole like you used to.
You have to mainly keep to your subscriptions, and use recommendations occasionally.
Back when Netflix was a DVD delivery service, its personal recommendation system was fantastic. Rate things by stars, it would estimate how you'd rank movies based on users with similar tastes to you, so rather than trying to give the same ratings to all movies and push the same things to everyone, it gave me a ton of very useful recommendations. I had a 500 movie long queue on it for awhile, so each movie I got was like a surprise from my past self.
Then one day they failed to deliver a DVD to my place because my mailbox was full or something, and they closed my account and my queue was gone. I never bothered trying to open another one after that.
365 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadSure, it works fine for "normal" content. That's fine. But for "divisive" stuff it's like having someone trying to push you off road at every moment
I don't know how Youtube's algorithms work internally, but lately the front page is just so broken that it's baffling. The sidebar recommendations are another discussion -- those are possibly more pernicious but at least not as obviously dysfunctional.
How is it possible to have the largest repository of video content in the world, yet Youtube is only able to recommend me the same videos over and over again (half of which I seen already or quickly clicked out of). There is also a simplistic list of recommended categories, which I would change if I could, and those never change either.
If the front page were just completely random, it would be better than it is now. If I could actually tell Youtube to show me videos with a low-to-moderate view count and a high upvote ratio, then that would be fabulous and I probably would encounter new subjects and ideas rather than getting stuck watching the same garbage over and over. I'll never let my future children spend even a second on Youtube, because the stuff that it recommends to kids is so asinine that it just makes me mad.
I really believe that collectively we are all much dumber because of the Youtube's pathetically bad algorithms.
Someone may say, this would bother others, who saw something interesting but didn't click it this time. For me, it would train me to open those in a new tab or save them to my Watch Later list. Or just make it an opt-in feature, this aggressive renewal of the home page.
And god help you if you watch even one off-topic video - like another comment mentions, YouTube algorithm then concludes you want to see a million more. Reminds me of a Weird Al lyric about TiVo: "I watched Will and Grace one time, one day. Now TiVo thinks I'm gay."
Youtube recommendations 10 years ago was so amazing. Just a refresh or two and you'd get interesting stuff - obscure or popular, new or old. It didn't matter. Now, it's the same corporate, propaganda or popular vids over and over again. You bring up youtube and it's mostly the same exact recommendations from yesterday and the day before. They are literally cycling the same videos over and over again.
Why not make the default search and recommendations "PC" to appease the toxic journalists. But give the users the option to revert back to the "normal" search and recommendations.
Why can't they do it like they do search. "Safe", "Moderate", "The good old days" modes?
I start out listening to a song with 1000 views, I get recommended 10k view songs, then 100k, and before you know it it's back in the mainstream. There's no way to surf a niche, to hunt in a pile of bin ends.
I imagine it's similar for conspiracy stuff. It'll point you in the direction of the most convincing nonsense.
1) CIA is interefering in US elections with evidence-free accuasation of Russia helping candidates who might reign them in to follow the law. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
2) Russia is paying bounties to kill American soldiers. Conspiracy? Or something to it?
3) Hunter Biden might be a bit corrupt. Conspiracy? or something to it?
4) The President has been compromised by Russia. Conspiracy? or something to it?
There will be incendiary stuff on all of the above absolutely full of utter nonsense. There will be reasonable stuff also assessing evidence and may even not come up with a clear and definite conclusion on one or another. Which of these will YT reccomendation push you to? I don't know.
(YT does much more cross-script indexing now than it did when I first started playing around with this, but it still tends to silo by writing system, and if it's relevant search works much better in the original script than relying upon auto-transliteration.)
I remember waaaaaay back in 2009-ish hunting for some new electronic music.
\begin{old_man_better_in_my_day}
First video I went on had about 1000 views. Every "related" video had around the same (sometimes less).
I spent 4 hours finding a bunch of new and relatively unknown artists because, rather than dragging me back to the 100k aggregate, I was allowed to explore the graph of "other people went on to watch this".
These days I'm lucky to see any sidebar suggestions that have fewer than 100k views.
\end{old_man_better_in_my_day}
I think the problem is the "one-size-fits-all" approach can't possibly capture how I would find it useful (music discovery via graph/tree traversal) vs. someone else (e.g. regular sky sports football highlights).
Doesn't this totally contradict the claim that youtube pushes people to the extremes?
I like stakeboarding but I am 41 and I have not practiced skateboarding in years.
But I am on the left on politics.
I delete the youtube app and put a URL blocker to stop this behavior.
In my experience both accounts do not try to push me to extremes. They DO try to keep me in a bubble, and both are very happy to lead me away from politics in general.
The entirety of my recommendations are Jordan Peterson.
Wtf
another interesting example from the past, I watched a few science/nature focused videos on Antarctica. Then youtube decided I wanted to see Antarctica conspiracy videos about aliens, secret buried worlds, and Nazi holdouts.
That being said, I think the recs have become much cleaner lately. i.e. no more Russia Today videos in my feed.
I suspect if you try and use it as a news source or anything other than entertainment it would be dangerous.
regarding what the article is talking about ... eh, it seems like they're saying it works fine but sometimes puts up videos whose politics they don't like. Short of going in and removing the stuff you don't like so that other people won't get to see it I don't see how you fix this. It's presumably the same algorithm that's working most of the time that's surfacing the crap.
christ, no kidding. this was my first clue that google has fundamentally changed as a company and it was time for me to leave.
ive been using gmail since it came out and watching YouTube with a signed-in, non adblocked experience for years. the algorithim doest give a SHIT. if i watch one "The Office" clip, thats suddenly 60-80% of my feed despite the fact that i dont particularly like the show. im not sure what theyve doing with all my data theyve been harvesting like gollum, but it sure isnt being used for my benefit. (i dont have kide, no one else uses my account, dont watch youtube through vpn, etc etc)
and dont get me started on the ads. ive never installed an anime girl fighting game, from gplay or anywhere else. stop it.
Now I actively push my normie friends to install uBlock Origin on their devices. And Vanced or NewPipe when it worked.
At least most television ads are placed in a slot designed for ads to be there. Though I still find them jaring for shows that arent up-beat.
To be honest, tv ads are the reason we dont watch a lot of TV anymore. The ad:content ratio is too high, and youtube has definitely as high or higher without an adblocker.
Edit: Also, I think many are jaded by cable where you pay and still get ads. Hulu has an ad-free tier, but I forget the history and if that's existed from the start. I do remember there being a lot of outrage about paying and still getting ads at some point.
One of the weird things tho, is that I didn't see Ads with Ad Blocker. Is there some regional thing that ad blocker doesn't work in the USA but it works elsewhere?
In terms of watch time and retention on site I imagine those binges are gold hence why they've ended up being optimised for.
I do not need to be constantly reminded of a single weird video I have clicked months before.
YouTube recommendations haunted me for life.
Oh, you watched a game streams? How about I show you three of that game on the top of the page until you stop coming back.
The only thing that works to get rid of them is to downvote it. I don't want to give the downvote, but it's the only way to make the algorithm understand I don't care about what they are showing me.
Whats worse is that for videos I haven't watched it recommends the same videos for weeks, even though I never watch it.
I feel like half of the recommendation slots are wasted in one of these ways.
It's quite something.
search for a famous song, and the recommendations are for a zillion cover versions of the same song, or other music by the same artist.
Granted the interaction model is very different, and who knows if I'd ever commit to watching even a 5 minute YouTube video on something I'm not primed to watch, but after Tik Tok, Youtube feels like a stale product of yesteryear.
There was a distinct point in time a couple years ago where this started to happen. Before that, my YouTube feed was always a diverse selection of all the different topics I had ever watched. Now, if I watch one car review my feed is full of car channels. If I watch one political video it fills with politics. Nothing I do seems to affect YouTube's singular focus on whatever topic I've most recently viewed.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Youtube's "recommended for you" section is a slot machine for whatever will engage you. For me it's novelty, for a lot of people it's an irresistible clickbait title. Nobody is immune to it, although I feel the hacker news crowd might be suspect to clickbait much more specific than whatever youtube chums the waters with on their front page when you're not logged in and have no history (open Youtube in an incognito window to see what I'm talking about, it's terrible).
Using scientific unification as a cognitive guide to understand this holistically: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714499/
Developers! Startups! Cap tables! Unicorns! Disrupt YC and tune it out.
Also don’t get me started on getting bombarded and suggested only “sound variations” videos which are noisy, rude and an attack on the senses - pure garbage content. Definitely a huge leap to assume I’ll find this interesting based on my previous choices.
Maybe instead of complaining here I should just go ahead and delete YouTube :)
IMHO it's better to have an account and configure it. The GDPR-like approach is much better than the do-you-mind-cookies-banners approach.
What is even worse such algorytms force creators to become part of this harmful scheme. Knowledge is the thing that is hurt also. It should be out there. For decades people learned how to explain complex things in an easy way. Because there is no other way we can as people evolve and learn.
But now these algorytms promote the opposite. People who have nothing to say, people who complicate simple stuff beyond imagination are paid for doing so.
On the other hand people who have something to say are bashed because they are not engaging enought, they don't do videos that fit needs of video addicts. So they are not paid.
Such algorytms are the worst thing humand kind invented in last years. The devastating effect of these can be compared to drugs and gambling. It should be banned.
People tend to suggest this is intended behavior, my question is instead: Is the recommendation engine all that good to begin with, given how a lot of people find their recommendations confusing, lackluster, or downright bad?
I find if you seed it carefully though it can be OK. e.g. Mine is mostly full of tech and trance videos. Hard for that to get toxic.
Politics, news, opinion pieces etc...and you quick get sucked into one of the echo chambers.
I suppose a case could be made that trance is my preferred echo chamber though...
For media I grew up in the 70s and had the TV Guide. I'd look through to see what I wanted to watch, circle some things and then watch. No spying what-so-ever.
So, I like for example HN where AFAIK I'm not tracked so much and I choose what I want from the top of the list.
Conversely I mostly hate Amazon, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and all the ad services and any other service that uses some algorithm to decide what to put in my face.
It's to the point that 3 out 4 time I'll open videos in private windows so they don't get added to my profile and used for recommendations.
I don't mind going to a tech sight and seeing ads for tech or a car site and seeing ads for cars. Do mind visiting an apartment listing site and then going around the net and having every other sight shove ads for apartments in my face.
Sadly, it’s largely your own history that clogs the recommendations. The less you use a recommendation engine the more relevant it becomes.
The search function recommends results that match your query. It's part of the same system!
-One of my managers
This is what I hear every time someone optimizes engagement.
I feel like I am in the minority in how I use YouTube. If someone shows me a video I'll watch it, but I don't browse YouTube.
The top of the list is the product of some recommendation algorithm. Clicking through https://news.ycombinator.com/newest, there were some 900 submissions in the past 24h; you probably chose from a small subset of that.
On Facebook "avoiding the algorithm" entails creating a friends list of all your friends, then using the link to that list as a portal into facebook. Posts and shares are listed in chronological order without anything missing (which is absolutely NOT true for the normal news feed, even when "chronological order" is selected). No "so-and-so commented on this" or "so-and-so liked that". Just posts and shares. Scroll through the feed until you recognize something, and you're done.
On youtube, you really should be going straight to subscriptions first. If you want to look for recommendations that's perfectly fine, you can go to the home page... but don't go there by default.
On reddit, I recommend using /r/all as a portal with some of the more obnoxious subreddits blocked.
I'm aware that what you see is still influenced by the algorithm in these examples, but the impact is reduced by a lot.
Browse with intention. Make deliberate choices. Don't just let the algorithm lead you around.
Remember, "the algorithm"s on these sites aren't designed for your benefit. They're designed to increase the site's metrics. More clicks. More time on that website.
But the website of all these site feels useless and slow to me. Recommendations were good on yt, but I think they stopped it during the election. So, I defaulted to newpipe and freetube.
You have to mainly keep to your subscriptions, and use recommendations occasionally.
Back when Netflix was a DVD delivery service, its personal recommendation system was fantastic. Rate things by stars, it would estimate how you'd rank movies based on users with similar tastes to you, so rather than trying to give the same ratings to all movies and push the same things to everyone, it gave me a ton of very useful recommendations. I had a 500 movie long queue on it for awhile, so each movie I got was like a surprise from my past self.
Then one day they failed to deliver a DVD to my place because my mailbox was full or something, and they closed my account and my queue was gone. I never bothered trying to open another one after that.